Newly assigned to a “non-job” and with four years to retirement, Manitoba bureaucrat Jack Dalgliesh whiled away the hours by reading the classics; 156 of them to be exact.

“I may have worked at most 10 days a year for roughly $93,000 or $94,000 a year,” the now-retired Mr. Dalgliesh wrote in a message released Tuesday by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

He was ready and willing to work, but with almost no assignments, he took to reading Tolstoy, Twain, Atwood and Dickens, among others. He made his way through 1984 and Brave New World, two books following protagonists trapped in bureaucracy-heavy dystopias.

An experienced accountant with more than two decades of experience in government, Mr. Dalgliesh said he had been relegated to the Manitoba Information Technology Branch after trying to blow the whistle on Crocus, a disastrous labour-sponsored investment fund.

“Everybody in the government knew it was going to blow, everybody who was involved with the file knew it was going to blow, and the NDP government was promoting it 18 months before it blew,” said Mr. Dalgliesh, speaking by phone from Winnipeg.

“It’s unbelievably nuts,” he added.

In the early 2000s, the Manitoba government assigned Mr. Dalgliesh, then with the provincial Department of Industry, to examine the Crocus Investment Fund, a labour-sponsored venture capital fund that had been heavily promoted by the province’s NDP government.

“There was a feeling of disquiet as it became apparent that Crocus had a real problem on its hands,” Mr. Dalgliesh told the CBC earlier this month in his first interview since Crocus’ 2004 collapse.

In a submission to cabinet in 2000 — and later a memo to superiors — Mr. Dalgliesh warned that if no action was taken, Crocus would go “belly-up” in four years.

The warning was not heeded, and in 2003, Greg Selinger, current Premier and then-finance minister, even cited Crocus in the legislature as “very successful.” The fund continued to be provided with tax credits until it fell into receivership in late 2004 — losing tens of millions of dollars for Manitoba investors.

A 2005 Auditor-General’s report later dug up the ominous memo, but in the meantime Mr. Dalgliesh’s bosses had reassigned him to the Manitoba Information Technology Branch.

Mr. Dalgliesh writes in the email to the taxpayers federation that he was “totally intimidated” by the transfer and as a result, was “not going to blow the whistle on Crocus or anyone else.”

“My wife and I have a badly intellectually disabled son and I really needed to continue working to put away a nest egg for him,” he wrote.

For the years following his transfer, Mr. Dalgliesh was “virtually under house arrest, but still on full pay with the government,” reads his email. Included with the message, he listed all 156 books he read.

The list is almost exclusively novels — save for a couple non-fiction books — and is a textbook cross-section of American literature, with a sprinkling of Russo-European classics including Les Miserables and Leo Tolstoy’s 600,000-word classic, War and Peace.

Mr. Dalgliesh’s favourite, he writes, is In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s account of the murders of a Kansas farmer and his family.

He also found time to learn the stock market, comb through 45 travel books and conduct an in-depth study of world philosophy ranging from the Greek philosopher Socrates to French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.

He retired in 2009, but Mr. Dalgliesh, 60, said he decided to step forward because the officials who promoted Crocus are still in government.

“You got a briefing note written up for you in 2000, you go into the legislature and basically juice the bloody thing — say it’s strong — and then the thing blows up 18 months later and you walk away unscathed,” he said.

Colin Craig, prairie director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said, “This individual seems to be one of the good ones in government … and the government didn’t like what he had to say so they put him in one of these do-nothing offices.”

Asked about Mr. Dalgliesh’s “warehousing” during Question Period in early December, Premier Selinger responded that, under whistleblower protection legislation passed in 2006, there are now anonymous avenues available for any government employee who spots maladministration, fraud, or negative activity.

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